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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   4377 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 04, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Anyone else feel like they are addicted to grand theories of everything? Anytime I get two minutes to myself to sit down and think I can't help but have my mind wander in the direction of psychohistorian style bullshit. Grand theories explaining the arc of history, of wokeness, or of financial booms and busts. Its all so enticing to me, but I'm pretty sure most of it is just a bullshit feeling that my mind spins up.

I feel it too.

Perhaps it’s easier to see in others, and easiest to spot in the sort of policy wonk most likely to write an elaborate justification.

But it’s a real, seductive feeling.

I just try and hold on to Occam’s and Hanlon’s razors.

I have an ambivalent stance of loving a "good" (as in: intuitive) grand theory but also having been trained by endless tearing apart of those theories by historians combined with just a general distrust in my own knowledge and ability to judge between them.

But they're so much more...fun than the narrower works that historians actually respect!

Newton was 'addicted' to grand theories, too! "Of an estimated ten million words of writing in Newton's papers, about one million deal with alchemy". Also a religious heretic, believing all sorts of random christian things.

Grand theories are fine, if they're true. If they're not, the problem isn't that they're "grand theoriesl", just that they're untrue. Read some science, history (although the former - physics, chem, bio, etc - is more uniformly reliable than the second), speak to/read from all sorts of people, and come up with the useful ones!

If they're not, the problem isn't that they're "grand theoriesl", just that they're untrue.

Yeah, but I think that's the problem - grand theories usually have a ton of exceptions, enough that using them in grand fashion will give you quite a few answers. In Tetlock's work on superforecasters, he found foxes beating hedgehogs (one summary here - https://www.themotte.org/post/1/smallscale-question-sunday-for-september-04/587?context=8#context). The grander the theory, the more likely that it's got flaws that will result in poor object-level predictions.

Is there any reason why one is called the fox and the other the hedgehog?

I have absolutely no idea. Good question.

Eh ... there are a lot of 'grand theories' that aren't grand in retrospect. Like - wow, everything is on a computer today! Proposing that in 1900 would've certainly been "grand", yet it happened. And narrow theories can also be very wrong too!

It ends up declaring - "ambitious theories are wrong". Which is often true, but ambitious theories are also useful if correct, so you shouldn't give up trying them

For forecasting - well, isn't "forecasting is a useful methodology in general" a grand theory? I think what Tetlock's seeing is -

I guess there's also a bit of "if you aren't being serious, it's incredibly easy to make a fake grand theory by just claiming things at random" - but unserious narrow theories aren't better than unserious grand theories. That might be what's causing the thing - historians do narrow work on the travel time of mail carriers in Derbyshire in 1750, some blogger declares all the world's problems are because of rent control. but the blogger isn't going to be more correct if he declares something about mail carriers in derbyshire.

Me and you both brother. After a lifetime of observation it feels like a unified theory is finally coming together. Things are starting to make sense. My very first lectures in linguistics in undergrad were bafflingly opaque. Unlike hard science we couldn't observe and measure anything physical, (well, phonetics aside). You can't see a noun. We (the humans) had to build up the concepts of syntax, morphology, phonology and so on. What we're describing has always existed but bringing it into conscious awareness and true definition meant seeing way beyond the fact that what goes up must come down.

So much of human behaviour is mystifyingly illogical yet mystifyingly consistent. Like linguistics, you can't see moral righteousness, you can't measure who whom. But we see these concepts in action consistently. We, the animals with the impulses driving this behaviour have had to step back from it, while practicing it, to watch it enough, understand it enough to crystallise it into something as easily digestible as: he is being domineering, they are being bullies, I am being assertive.

There's no Galileo of human behavior to hand these concepts down from on high. We're putting it together ourselves on the fly, right now, in this century. It's very exciting. In hard science they say there's no low hanging fruit left but the social sciences are nowhere near that. Scott, big Yud, they're the backyard scientists of yore. Psychologically we're still in an age where grand discoveries can be made by laymen.

Mainstream psychological understanding is still somewhere near where biology was with Spontaneous Generation theory: a total guess taken as fact for 2000 years.

I had a phase like that.

I already found the one grand theory of everything I’m pretty much planning on sticking to. It helped return my mental health, it taught me about music theory and politics, and I don’t believe I can see the world any other way now that it’s so deeply ingrained.

Triessentialism is the theory that there are three fundamentally different types of things, and fractally reiterates.

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